Courtesy / Maine Tourism Association
Tony Cameron is the Maine Tourism Association’s new chief executive officer.
Updated: March 5, 2020
New Maine Tourism CEO is optimistic about 2020
Photo / Laurie Schreiber
Tourists head down to the water for an afternoon of whale watching in Bar Harbor. Despite worldwide concerns about coronavirus, the Maine Tourism Association is optimistic about the coming season.
Despite the global threat of the COVID-19 outbreak, the new CEO of the Maine Tourism Association is optimistic that the state's industry will have a robust year.
“We’re going to stay optimistic,” Tony Cameron, whose appointment was announced Wednesday, told Mainebiz in an interview. “Everyone is aware of what’s happening, but Maine is a great place to go out and explore the outdoors.”
Cameron succeeds Chris Fogg, who resigned at the end of December.
Tourism is one of Maine’s top industries, supporting 107,000 jobs and generating $9 billion in sales in 2018. An estimated 36 million people visited the state that year.
Heading into a tourism season overshadowed so far by concerns about the coronavirus, the association plans to reinforce safety tips at the seven visitor information centers it operates.
“We’ll have some messaging we’ll funnel to our visitor centers” on proper hand washing and other tips that have been widely disseminated, he said. “And we’re trying to get some of that messaging to our membership and businesses.
"A lot of that information is already out there, but there are some specific tool kits that the [Washington, D.C.-based] U.S. Travel Association has put out there and we’ll probably mimic some of those things.”
Leadership shift
After Fogg departed the Maine Tourism Association, Bob Meyers served as interim CEO and will stay on, likely to the end of March, to help with the transition, said Cameron. Meyers was previously the executive director of the Maine Snowmobile Association.
Cameron became CEO after serving the association as director of marketing and communications for nearly five years. He previously served as the executive director of the Ellsworth Area Chamber of Commerce and the Boothbay Harbor Region Chamber of Commerce, as well as the director of marketing and membership sales for the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce.
Cameron earned a degree from Saint Joseph’s College in business administration with a concentration in marketing. He grew up in Brunswick, where he currently resides.
“Tony understands the opportunities and challenges faced by the tourism industry,” Rick Snow, chairman of the association’s board of directors, said in a news release. “His expertise in travel publications, destination marketing, digital platforms, membership management, and visitor center operations make him the best person to lead the Maine Tourism Association.”
The association, founded in 1921 as the Maine Publicity Bureau, is looking forward to its centennial in 2021, said Cameron.
“We’re looking forward to celebrating 100 years of promoting Maine and keeping the Maine tourism industry sustainable,” he said. “What’s really awesome, as we look back 100 years, is how the organization has promoted tourism as an economic river for the state of Maine in so many ways.
"Tourism has been a constant and remains that way. We want to make that known. So some of our messaging over the next couple of years will be geared around tourism’s economic impact and sustainability.”
Working with the Maine Office of Tourism, the association is the largest tourism group in Maine, made up of 1,600 business members including lodgings, restaurants, camps, campgrounds, retail establishments, amusements, and cultural and heritage attractions. In addition to providing marketing and legislative benefits for its members, it produces the state’s official travel planner, “Maine Invites You,” and the state map; and operates visitor information centers in Kittery, Yarmouth, Fryeburg, Hampden (two centers), Houlton and Calais.
The association puts out 300,000 Maine Invites You magazines and continues to see demand for it as a print publication, Cameron said.
“People still want print publications,” he said. “Those traditional means for travel are still impactful.”
The association is also looking into additional visitor engagement platforms such as user-generated content, he added.
“We’re hoping to get visitors off the beaten path and expose them to more of what Maine has to offer so they’ll stay longer and want to come back,” he said.
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